Tuesday, 19 June 2007

TwitterBot

I spent some time over the weekend building a TwitterBot, an object that relays any chat it hears on to Twitter and that passes any tweets targeted at it back into Second Life.

You can see the resulting object in the SLashup area on Eduserv Island.

I have a couple more bits of work to do on the code, making it configure itself from a notecard and allowing people to register their Twitter account names with it, then I'll make it all freely available.

To track messages sent from the current TwitterBot on Eduserv Island, you need to follow 'eduservisland' in Twitter. Note that we'll be using this to feed out the discussion in the symposium follow-up meeting to Twitter later today. Again, this will be very experimental.

I thought it worked pretty well. Had to drop out of the event as SL and other apps were placing too heavy a burden on my PC. However, the twitter app has virtually no load, and doesn't require constant monitoring. It's also the only time I've found twitter, which seems to be little more than SMS for the net, to have a practical use.

So long as you don't need to be there and participate, but still want to keep an eye on proceedings as they happen, it's a useful device. It's also useful for if an event is simply too popular in SL and limitations are in place on the number of attendees.

Plus, as Peter points out, it gets content out of SL and into something else. Something that SL doesn't get criticised (much) for, though services such as Facebook do.

You should publicise twitterbot more, perhaps, and have a bot running at future SL/RL seminars?